Goat is good as long as it's a nanny or a wether. Don't try to eat a billy. He will stink you out of the kitchen while cooking.

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"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me . . . Anything can happen, child. Anything can be"

I use to eat goat back over 30 years ago when I was drinking. Back then we never ate it as a meal. We would cook it over an open fire and just cut pieces off as it was done. If nip come to tuck I would eat it. I have them mainly to control the under growth in the woods and field. I done with my goats like I'm doing with my bees, read, read, read. You have to keep an eye on them. Way too many parasites to take them out. Old folks used to say, "A goat ain't nothing but an animal looking for a place to die."

My goats are not 100% nothing. I considered them brush goats with predominate lines. What you see in the pictures is brush goats with some predominate boer attributes. I also have others with traits such as Kiko, Oberhashli/Sabeen, Nubian and I probably left someone out. My Kiko is the herd sire. I've seen pictures of studs that looked just like him. They were getting anywhere from $150 to $200 just for him to service a nanny.

I've heard horror stories about Boer goats and I've heard those who own them say they are easy to raise. Goat prices are kind of like crops, sometimes the price is way up there and sometimes it ain't. Do not, do not get one from a sales barn. Get one from an individual. Most goats that sell at a barn will go for slaughter. Honest people will bring their non performers or sickly goats there to get rid of them. The goats I don't want to sell to an individual I take to the sales barn.

I'm a first year beek. The bees are probably 30 to 40 yards to the nearest section of the pen. The pen is probably 14 acres. If they were inside the pen the goats would rub against the hives and knock them over I'm sure.

I have 11 goats for my primary stock. Most newborns are born in Dec/Jan. By the time spring rolls around I don't have to feed them anymore until Nov/Dec. By that time I've sold most of the newborns to buy hay.

i've read that spanish goats are a lot more parasite resistant but i think they're a bit harder to find around here. i knew that there were some parasite problems from something that deer carry that doesn't hurt the deer but is really hard on the goats but i can't remember what it's called.

If my memory serves me well it's called deer worm. Something about it knowing it's way around in a deer but gets lost in a goat. You can see trails where the hair falls off of the goat. It pretty much ends up in the goat's brain.

Spanish goat are supposed to be pretty good. But they are talking about a pure Spanish goat which is hard to find. The Kiko's are also fairly resistant to a lot of parasites. A lot of folks who keeps goats will put 5 or 6 in a small area. I think it's something like 6 to 8 goats per acre. I think that's too many. I have less than one goat per acre and they keep it mowed down really good. Overcrowding equals too much poop, and that's not good for anything.

BlueBee; Some of the parasites in a goat are passed on through the poop. When the eggs hatch in the poop the parasite climbs up a blade of grass 4 or 5 inches. The goats come through and eat the low grass thus ingesting the parasite, who takes up host in the intestinal tract. The parasite can only survive either 30 or 60 days before it has to find a host. If no host is available it dies. By having larger grazing areas it increases the likelihood that the parasite won't complete it's cycle. Some goat ranchers have enough paddocks (fenced in pastures within a pasture) that by the time they move them back to the first paddock the parasites there didn't complete their didn't survive.

If your goat is stressed, i.e., relocation, pregnancy/giving birth, or other factors, the parasites will have a population explosion inside the goat. I try to worm mine at least once a year and after they give birth. You can monitor their worm load by doing a fecal test using a microscope or just check the inside of their bottom eyelid. You're looking for a healthy red. Anything else suggests that the parasites are sucking the blood out of them. However, I have a couple of goats whose eyelids have never appeared to be a healthy red. But they're fine. Sometimes it's just the goat. My Kiko nanny's eyelids are always a bright red.

When I first started getting goats I got a "deal" on a herd. Averaged out about $22 a goat for around a dozen. That was my enrollment into parasite school. Anywho, after I lost a couple, and doctored the heck out of them, I had one that was always skin and bones. I mean her rib bones were very pronounced. I poured the feed to her too. Never got fat. Most likely what happened was she had had such a heavy parasite load all her life they damaged her intestinal tract and/or stomach lining. When they take up residence in a host they attached themselves to the inner lining of the stomach or intestines. (goats have 4 stomachs). When you kill them they release and scar tissue forms. This scar tissue prevents nutrients from being absorbed into the body.

You have to be careful when treating a goat (or any animal) with a heavy load. If you kill too many at one time the goat will bleed to death on the inside. I isolate the goat and give them a mild treatment the first week. By the third treatment I put it to them, making sure no "resistant" parasites survive.

So 1 goat per acre can keep the place mowed down? Hmmmm, that might be cheaper than mowing! Do you still need to rotate the goats between different pastures / paddocks for parasite control if you keep your density down around 1 per acre?

Now-a-days I rarely have a problem with parasites. As in all things it's better to prevent than to cure. Learn what to look for. The 14 acres I use is probably 5 to 6 pasture and the rest woods. A great website to learn is www.goatwisdom.com That'll get you to the home page. Click on "message board" that'll get you to the forums. If you were looking at getting goats read as many threads as you can in the "urgent health request" (forum). That'll be a start. There's other forums on there that are very helpful as well. If you get some and have problems I can give you my phone number and you can describe the symptoms and I'll try to figure it out.

I sold some goats to a family a couple of years ago. As always, I gave them my phone number and told them to call me. Sure enough they called a couple days later and were frantic. "Something's wrong with my goats, I know it ain't from your end, there's something around here making them sick. When they try to stand up the fall or just their rear end stands up." I ask them if they had checked and cleaned their water source out and they said yes. So I drove up there and looked around the pen. They had a black water container that "looked" clean. I reached down in there and scrubbed the bottom and sure enough - algae. If they drink water long from a source with algae growing in it they will get (sp) Listeriosis. If left alone it will develop into goat polio. I gave them all a shot of "fortified" vit B complex. It's high in Thiamine. Pure thiamine will require a vet to be involved. It took about 30 minutes and they were back at being goats.

There's a lot to learn about them, but heck you're keeping bees alive.

Another thing, those two babies that were born have me a little worried. I always spray iodine on their naval cords for the first couple of days. It keeps them from taking up germs around the pen. I knew their time was close so I dedicated a few hours to shoveling out their stalls and putting fresh pine straw down. You don't want them born in poop, and I'm here to tell you goats poop almost every time they inhale. It's called goat berries. You want the poop to be the shape of berries, if not there may be a problem.

You mentioned something about you didn't know they were so complicated, well I have a tendency to complicate things. There's a lot of merit to what the old timers used to say about a goat ain't nothing but an animal looking for a place to die.

If you have an area you want cleaned up get a couple goats. Once it's about cleaned up then get rid of all but one or two. Some folks won't keep a billy, "a waste of feed" they say. They'll buy one and once he services the nannies they'll sell him. I don't operate like that. I have a closed herd. No newcomers. New goats could mean new sicknesses. In livestock it's called "line-breeding". If a fluke is born it's called "in-breeding". I've been doing this for a few years and no misfits yet.